Friend of My Youth

by Amit Chaudhuri

  I can’t put my finger on the reason, but most journalists today finish the book. The desperation has passed. Sometimes a conversation is possible.

  It takes everything in me to be still till it’s eleven. Then I rise.

  *

  In the foyer, I’m startled by the bold fragrance of vada; then the sour stink of sambar swims briefly towards me.

  Waiting for my man. My eye lights on a newspaper. I missed one this morning, but the cold turkey didn’t last long. Already, in two hours, the news on the front page looks irrelevant, as Orpheus had become to Eurydice when he turned round. I glance at the headlines. Kasab. They’ve been wondering what to do with him. They’re going to kill him, of course. Sentenced a few months ago. When he was discovered in Chowpatty, he pretended to be dead. Then he wanted treatment: ‘I don’t want to die’ – the life-urge waking in him fiercely. Later, his inclination changed: ‘I don’t want to live.’

  The paper’s edges rattle. A waiter drifts to the next table: plate heaped with sev puri.

  ‘Sir?’

  Ah, this must be my man! He’s embarrassed – or is he just uncomfortable meeting me?

  ‘You’re Nilanjan?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. There was a problem with my train.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Malad.’

  When I was a boy, people knew Malad as they knew Jupiter. Today, every other person is from Malad or Mulund. The city I grew up in, called ‘Bombay’ then, is now ‘South Bombay’. Only those with inherited wealth live here. The staff live in quarters and outhouses. The middle class live in Malad or Mulund. Or further afield (like me), in Calcutta or England. We make short trips to South Bombay.

  ‘You got off at VT?’

  ‘No, Churchgate, sir.’

  ‘You come every day?’

  As we talk, I take him to a table near the main entrance, where the smell of vada is near-absent. The ceiling fan battens the air at great speed. He deposits his bag and unzips it.

  ‘Only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I came today because they said you’re leaving tomorrow.’ He looks up from the bag, smiles. Retrieves a gadget.

  ‘Yes, I have to get back.’ He doesn’t know that I’m sometimes in two minds about staying on. When I was a child, I missed Calcutta so much I’d pray for the holidays to come. Then, at the close of summer vacations in Calcutta, I’d literally pray for the flight home to be cancelled. Only once did God listen and such a disruption take place. I haven’t forgotten that unexplained bit of largesse; the journey back to Pratapaditya Road and my uncle’s house; the homecoming – because I thought of Calcutta as home – all over again; the spectacle I made of myself in my unfettered joy. That’s how much I resisted Bombay then.

  ‘How much time does it take you?’

  ‘To Churchgate? An hour.’

  ‘That’s not too bad.’

  It takes an hour if you’re coming in from Bandra, from Juhu, from the airport, from Andheri West – and from Malad. An hour to reach the gothic terminuses; the glowing hotels; Chowpatty Beach; the roundabout at Flora Fountain. An hour’s a symbolic duration.

  ‘You’ve lived in Malad for long?’

  I lead life vicariously. The young man fascinates me. I envy this daily closeness to Bombay.

  ‘Two years, sir.’

  His surname could make him Punjabi or Rajasthani. Or Bengali.

  ‘I came here from Kolkata.’

  Ah. That accounts for the dishevellment. It’s more than today’s onerous journey. But I also envy him his new life in Malad. The grind. The excitement of commuting to the city. The exhaustion and uncertainty later.

  ‘Should we sit here?’

  He presses a switch and a red speck begins to burn. He places the gadget at a polite distance.

  ‘You don’t mind if I record this?’

  ‘I’d be happier if you did.’

  Smiling, he begins.

  ‘It’s nine years since you published your last novel. Why the gap?’

  A premeditated query. Yet I’m flattered at his concern.

  ‘I suddenly grew tired of the novel,’ I confess. ‘No more, I thought. I returned to India from Britain in 1999. And I asked myself, “Must I produce a novel every other year? Can’t I take a sabbatical? Does every experience I have need to be addressed by this one form?”’

  As a backup, he’s taken out a notebook and ballpoint. He starts to scribble.

  I feel a surge of bile against a genre that’s squatted on the writer’s life for two decades – demanded submission; determined failure and success; defined the writer’s sense of worth or lack of it. I’m a novelist, but at some point I’ve been – as they might say these days in US Intelligence – ‘turned’. I pretend; bide my time. And, when I can, undermine the genre I work with – or for.

  ‘It’s your longest book, no, sir?’

  ‘It’s gigantic by my standards.’ Leaning against the tinted glass of the restaurant, a waiter who knows me by sight is idly speculating. Club employees have a bit of the custodian in them. They make me nervous for no reason. I’m not sure if press interviews are permitted on the premises or if I have to write a letter to the secretary. ‘This is a proper novel, I think.’ Nilanjan nods eagerly. ‘It took me a while, but I finally think I’ve learnt how to write novels.’

  He looks up.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m thinking of Frank O’Connor’ – the waiter shifts his gaze – ‘who said that the poem or the short story is about the … the moment, and the novel – I think he had the nineteenth-century novel in mind – about the passage of time. You can follow the arc that characters’ lives make in a novel, almost from birth to youth to adulthood to old age to the time of death. Over the novel’s duration, you’re witness to a flowering and attrition. The poem gives you a beginning endlessly. It represents a fascination with openings. It never wants to move, in effect, beyond the first paragraph: the magic of the start. It’s a kind of addiction. The short story writer too must have experienced that addiction somewhat, and never recovered. The novelist says, “The beginning is done; I must get on with it.”’

  ‘And The Immortals?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s more a novel, right?’ I take stock. ‘Though there are, by O’Connor’s guidelines, short stories that do the job novels are supposed to: give us a sense of a lifetime having passed. I’m thinking of Maupassant. You remember the story in our school reader? “The Necklace”? I read it in the eighth standard.’ He nods. ‘A succinct tale. But by the time you’ve reached the end and realized the mistake the woman’s made, you get a sense of an entire life lived and possibly wasted. Length and brevity are matters of perception, and, when you realize at the end of many years that you were tortured by a delusion, those years might seem insubstantial, as they do at the end of “The Necklace”. Maupassant is good at doing in two pages what a novelist might achieve over four hundred. I’m thinking of something quite short, maybe a page and a half, called “A Day in the Country”, in which two couples are described (petit bourgeois holiday-makers in a French village, not unlike people you see today in Puri or Sarnath), and their tics, compulsions, emotions. Then, at the end, there’s a leap of fifteen years into the future, and a two-line coda about what happened to the holiday-makers. You grasp a lifetime in that story. By O’Connor’s formulation, it could be called a novel.’

  He subjects the gadget to a nervous scholarly stare.

  ‘Just checking,’ he says, sheepish. ‘I once did an interview and found nothing was recorded.’

  Ting. Ting. Spoons.

  ‘Want to see if it’s all right? Better to do it now.’

  ‘OK.’

  He fondles a switch. Presses rewind. At first, it’s the club we hear; the lobby reduced to a hiss. Then my voice, unbelievably earnest and self-regarding, like a young priest’s. The words near-incomprehensible.

  ‘It’s fine.’ He smiles.

  ‘Should we continue?’

  ‘Ho
w much of the novel is autobiographical, sir?’ He pushes the machine a few centimetres towards me.

  Well, this had to come up. A stock question, but thrown at me with a certain punctiliousness.

  ‘I don’t like the word “autobiography”.’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘Because I’m not really interested in telling you about my life. The term indicates that I am.’

  Nilanjan looks worried.

  ‘Of course, I’ve described this neighbourhood in the novel, and’ – I gesture, lifting an arm – ‘I did grow up here.’

  A waiter looks undecided at my movement. He’s unsure if I want to place an order.

  ‘But that’s beside the point. The reason Nirmalya spends part of his life here is not because I want to give out information about myself.’ He’s making notes again. ‘The genre of “autobiography” presumes you first live your life and then pour it into a piece of writing. But Barthes – Roland Barthes?’ – Nilanjan doesn’t deny knowing the man – ‘says that you’d be wrong to think that Proust based his character Charlus on a man called Montesquiou. Barthes believed that Montesquiou modelled his life on Charlus.’

  Nilanjan looks up sharply.

  ‘So this idea that life doesn’t have to precede writing starts to make sense. Have you noticed that, when you’re immersed in a book, it takes a while to come out of it when you look up? If the novel is set in 1915, you’ll find the room and street you’re in will belong for a couple of minutes to 1915. Writing generates life.’

  A bearded man in a kurta stumbles towards our table.

  ‘Ashwin!’

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ He glances at his watch to check if this is true.

  ‘Ashwin is the photographer,’ says Nilanjan.

  ‘Hi, Ashwin.’

  He ducks his head. ‘Sorry, got held up.’

  Lowering his voice, as if Ashwin’s appearance had introduced an illicit element so far absent from the interview, Nilanjan asks: ‘Do you mind if he takes photographs? While we talk?’ They exchange a look. Impossible to read.

  ‘No problem.’

  Bending behind the wicker chair as if for camouflage, Ashwin focuses his camera.

  ‘Who or what do you think the real protagonist of your novel is?’ asks Nilanjan soothingly, as if his main concern now is to distract me from the photographer. ‘Is it Nirmalya – is it Shyam Lal – or is it music?’

  ‘I was exploring a misunderstanding in the novel – between Nirmalya and his music teacher. A misunderstanding with a hint of tragicomedy.’ I hear a click: it throws me. But not in a way I’m unused to. I breathe deeply. ‘Nirmalya belongs to this world.’ Again, I wave my hand without precision. I feel thirsty. ‘But he hates it. He pretends to be poor. He won’t be driven around in a Mercedes. He wears torn kurtas. But he doesn’t give up on Joy Shoes sandals.’ I smile, but Nilanjan hasn’t caught the reference. ‘Nirmalya can’t figure out why Shyam Lal, a great singer, a man from a traditional music family, wants to make inroads here’ – I indicate my environment – ‘a world Nirmalya – a typical teenager in some ways – thinks is completely superficial.’ The term ‘South Bombay’ has very recently entered my vocabulary, but not with enough authority for me to use it now. ‘On the other hand, Shyam Lal is puzzled by Nirmalya. He’s proud the rich ladies of Malabar Hill want to learn singing from him. He can’t see, really, why Nirmalya is sullen about the life he’s so lucky to have.’

  The clicking punctuates my words every ten or twelve seconds, frequently accelerating into a frantic whirring.

  ‘The comedy comes from how Nirmalya becomes his teacher’s instructor. “You must change your life” is his baneful teenage message to Shyam Lal. One thing I learnt while writing the book is that the novel is a form in which you can mock that message (given that Nirmalya is the one saying it) without diluting its urgency.’

  When our conversation peters out, Ashwin suggests we change location.

  ‘One or two pictures in another side of the club,’ he says, pointing to the path skirting the swimming pool. It appears to lead to a little wood. No, a small playground, with swings.

  I step out into the sun and smell chlorine and water. Ashwin asks me to lean against a tree. Behind him is the building in which I grew up; too bright to look at the higher floors. He takes a picture, then steps forward to adjust my chin, turning it to the right. I have surrendered to him. Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us. ‘Perfect,’ says Ashwin, releasing a fresh burst of clicking.

  We head now in the opposite direction. We’re at the main entrance, tennis courts on the far right, an outhouse in front of me. I could see both from my balcony. The brisk tennis players, getting out of their cars with their racquets. Dark ball boys surrogating as their tennis partners. Ashwin asks me to stand by the wall separating the courts from the driveway. He gets down on one knee. He’s taken a couple when he finds himself obstructing an incoming Honda. He rises; the security guard waves prohibitively. I make my way back and stand by the outhouse. How I envied its daily goings-on! The girls who lowered keys in buckets. The sloping roofs. Ashwin and Nilanjan are conferring. I still don’t know who occupies its rooms: club employees; the people who work in the shops on the main road; the adjoining mansions’ staff. Even the cat lying on the ledge has more room than I ever did in Malabar Hill.

  I adore Parsi food. After Nilanjan and Ashwin leave, I talk to Janardhan, the rep, and we decide to meet at the Britannia Restaurant. When I was growing up here, I waited for invitations to Navjot ceremonies and Parsi weddings. There was no other way of tasting that food. Even now, I’m not sure what ‘Navjot’ is, but guess it’s a coming-of-age moment, equivalent to what the sacred thread ceremony would have been to a Brahmin boy.

  I thought there were no Parsi restaurants. I kept waiting for wedding and Navjot invitations. I concluded that Parsis, like Goans and Bengalis, were inept at marketing their cuisine. It’s true those restaurants were few and far between. But they did exist. It’s just that I didn’t know them. I was so ignorant of Bombay. One, for instance – Paradise Café – is close to Ramu’s house, on the opposite side of the street. I had no idea. Now I’ve tasted its food and even witnessed its renovation. Ramu took me there to eat sali boti and caramel custard.

  It seems to me that Bombay doesn’t know me, as a writer or person; that I must find readers here. But, also, it seems I don’t know Bombay; I must have looked the other way when I was in it. What else can explain my previous unawareness of places I eat at these days, now that I don’t live here: Paradise; Jimmy Boy’s; Britannia? It’s not that I didn’t try to find them. I remember hearing, on one of my trips back from England, that the Ratan Tata Institute on Hughes Road had opened a Parsi restaurant. Finally! So we set out on that nearly hour-long journey, my parents and I, from Bandra to RTI, charged with anticipation for kid gosht and dhansak. On reaching there we discovered the place was closed. Ah, Parsi food and me! Our paths, those days, seemed destined never to intersect.

  I’m hungry.

  ‘Britannia,’ I say to the taxi driver.

  His face in the mirror is expressionless. He doesn’t want to come out and say he doesn’t know.

  ‘Ballard Estate.’ He turns the ignition on.

  Britannia is not a Parsi restaurant. I’m told it’s Irani. The difference isn’t clear. Iranis and Parsis are both Zoroastrian. Except for the ‘berry pulao’ on Britannia’s menu, the cuisines are identical. The thought of the pulao animates my alimentary juices. I feel a pang.

  There was no Britannia Restaurant for my parents and me. I lit upon it in conversations a few years ago, when I was visiting Bombay and going on about Parsi food. ‘Open only for lunch,’ they cautioned. It took me two years to make time to eat there. Now, when we’re in Ballard Estate and ask for directions at the Mint, a part of me feels a bit stupid about how late I’ve been reaching this place. I began looking for it years ago; it was here all along. The feeling of foolishness won’t go away.


  *

  Janardhan is among the gathering on the pavement. Our names are on the waiting list. He shakes my hand; smiles joyfully. ‘We’re number three, sir,’ he tells me. ‘He said ten–fifteen minutes,’ indicating the shambolic man conducting table placements and issuing orders from a dark desk. ‘Too crowded.’ Britannia is in the Lonely Planet guide.

  Most of the time Janardhan travels in Maharashtra, selling textbooks and blockbusters to outlets in small towns, possibly putting in a good word for me. He sees I’m different from the blockbuster writers. Mysteriously, I’m fairly well known, though my books don’t sell in large numbers. It’s got something to do with my reputation ‘abroad’, this inexplicable position I occupy: he senses this, with a vague curiosity and regard. He also recognizes I’m incidental to the business. He thinks I’m a throwback. It would be a cliché to claim that our relationship would have been the same had he been dealing in pulses and I were a supplier. It matters to him that I’m a writer. That’s because there’s a writer in him. I feel the writer stir – ingenuous, shrewd – when we spend time together.

  I’ve actually only seen him once before. We liked each other instantly.

  ‘How’s your friend, sir?’ He puts the question to me when we’re seated.

  I’m looking at the menu. I already know what to order.

  My friend? Of course. Janardhan’s one of the many who were introduced to Ramu in the course of my readings here.

  ‘Ramu?’ I say.

  ‘Haa, Ramu!’ he cries, delighted to hear the name.

  Their conversations were competitive at first. That’s not just to do with Ramu’s possessiveness (he’s competitive with my wife, and once told me: ‘I’ve known you for much longer than she has’); it comes from his bias against strangers, from keeping to himself too much. Janardhan noticed Ramu was at a loose end. It amused him. Ramu is incredibly sensitive, and might have imagined Janardhan was amused even if he wasn’t. He bristled – he felt he was superior to Janardhan.